Google Book Search 'My Library' so far falls short

So, I saw the items I Shared about Google Book Search now allowing a 'My Library' feature, with the potential promise of letting me put up a collection of books and allowing me to search them. If true, that would be huge - put all my church books up and let google pull out the bits I need for a talk, or build a whole ideal research library and go wild looking up text within. Sadly, that's not the case. I figured a way for Librarything to give me all my ISBNs, which I then imported into Google reader - about 1/3 were rejected for unknown reasons.

The rest are here, in 'My Library'. Kinda cool, but nothing Librarything doesn't already do. One thing you'll notice is that nearly all of the books have 'No Preview Available', which means their text isn't searchable on Google Book Search. A few have 'Limited Preview', which is just as useless.

So, for now at least, the 'My Library' function isn't all that useful.

Case of the disappearing books

I'm loosing books. Good books. Maybe only good books; it's a little difficult to tell.

I started to notice this when we were leaving for vacation and Michelle needed a good book to read. "Oh, I'll find you something," I said.

"Hmmm.... that's odd... Salt: A World History doesn't seem to be on the shelves..."

"No matter, let me dig out Neuromancer..."

"..."

"..."

"I... must have lent it out?"

Then, just now, I was checking out 'In Very Deed, where cousin-in-law Katy makes an off the cuff Confederacy of Dunces comment. Now, there aren't that many of us running around the internet, so when a fellow CoD fan throws that out there, its the responsibility of the rest of us to respond. Only, suddenly I couldn't remember Ignatius' last name! So I went for my trusty copy, but couldn't find it! Now, I might lend you Salt or Neuromancer, but I'm unlikely to suggest Confederacy of Dunces unless I know you pretty well; its just not a 'hey-you-might-try-this-one' kinda book. So now I'm convinced the book gnomes are making off with the good books.

If I've lent you a good book, please give it back to me. The library is shrinking.

(Epilogue: I did eventually find Confederacy. It was hiding behind Snow Crash)